1. Technical Field
The invention is related to a method and of system capable of providing multimedia information to a user at reduced battery consumption.
2. Background Information
Examples of standard approaches, their limitations and existing solutions are provided below.
Smartphones, Audio Guides and similar information systems have become popular in recent years. Augmented Reality, as a new user interface paradigm, has seen great progress, especially based on computer vision algorithms for object recognition and pose estimation. Head mounted displays, equipped with a camera have been known for some time (e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 7,245,273).
One major obstacle for the true success of ubiquitous information systems, which are able to always watch the user's surrounding for interesting objects, is the high power-consumption of image processing algorithms run on the application processor or the GPU.
The closest state of art we could find to our invention is U.S. Pat. No. 7,302,089. The '089 Patent describes the idea of running a mobile device in low power mode (standby) and high power mode (active). In low power mode, the camera may take a low-resolution image and match it against a known symbol (e.g. the face of the user of the phone or an image). If in the low-resolution image a known symbol is found, the phone may wake up and take a higher resolution image to verify the result and basically unlock the phone in order to take a call or similar things. The goal of the '089 Patent is to enable a power-efficient unlocking, based on images. A scenario might be the phone is laying around and as soon as it receives a call, it tries to check if the user gets in sight in order to unlock the screen.